Mining the Sky: Discovering the Unexpected

Fueled by advances in software, computation, microelectronics, and large optics fabrication, a novel type of sky survey will begin in 2022. In a rapid campaign of 30 second exposures, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will cover the southern sky deeply for ten years, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales. The deep images from the LSST will chart billions of remote galaxies in 4-D, providing multiple interlocking probes of the mysterious Dark Matter and Dark Energy. In a high dimensional database, hundreds of petabytes will be mined for the unexpected.